Raleigh News & Observer

According to scientific studies, most people don’t laugh out loud when alone. When you’re by yourself and read or watch something funny, you might smile or even chuckle a little. Laughter in a crowd is contagious, but full-on laughter by yourself is a strictly spontaneous reaction.

So it must mean something that I laughed out loud a dozen times – all by my lonesome – watching “Damsels in Distress,” the delightful new comedy from director Whit Stillman.

The weird thing is, “Damsels” isn’t really a laugh-out-loud kind of movie. A modest, eccentric comedy of manners, the movie earns its laughs with its quiet surprises and unexpected absurdity. You don’t laugh at Whitman’s movie. You laugh with it.

“Damsels” tells the story of four young women at a small Ivy League-type college in New England. Led by the unsinkable Violet (Greta Gerwig), the ladies are dedicated to improving themselves and others through random acts of kindness and well-intentioned condescension.

Violet’s specialty is rehabilitating frat-boy doofuses – or doofi, to use the preferred plural form. Violet actually enjoys dating losers, since there is so much room for improvement. “They’re in that sympathetic range of being not good-looking, and yet not smart,” she says.

Violet’s pals – Heather (Carrie MacLemore), Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Lily (Analeigh Tipton) – develop their own romantic entanglements as the movie progresses. Meanwhile, the girls do their best to improve life on campus for everyone – staffing the suicide prevention center (free doughnuts!) and gifting dorm dwellers with sensible hygiene products.

For director Stillman, “Damsels” is a return to familiar territory after his great 1990s trilogy of 20-something WASPs in love (“Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco”).

“Damsels” is more overtly comic than any of those, and Stillman has a few running gags that are just masterfully deployed. Another joy of Stillman’s movies is the precise, musical dialogue. His overeducated characters don’t employ the English language so much as they luxuriate in it, with articulate digressions and flowery bon mots. Stillman’s mannered style is often compared to Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse, and even the film’s title cards suggest a Vanity Fair magazine cover, circa 1910.

All of which would ring rather hollow, except that “Damsels” has real heart, too. Gerwig’s performance anchors the movie in this regard. As the social ringleader Violet, Gerwig is playing a person who is herself playing a part. Beneath Violet’s airy self-assurance is a barely contained emotional panic, and Gerwig reveals the layers gradually. In fact, at one point we discover that Violet, and at least one of her friends, may not be who they say they are at all.

These issues of identity and 20-something neurosis are constantly bubbling under the surface in “Damsels.” The characters in the movie aren’t quite fully formed – they’re young adults still working out what kind of grown-ups they’re going to be. It takes real filmmaking chops to explore this terrain while keeping the tone so feather-light and funny.

Raleigh News & Observer

It’s been more than 50 years since Alfred Hitchcock made his most famous movie, “Psycho,” in 1960. Since then, an entire generation of movie lovers has come of age admiring the great director from a distance, via home video, late-night TV broadcasts or – heaven help us – dubious Hollywood remakes.

But starting this weekend, film geeks and casual fans alike can experience Hitchcock films the way they were meant to be seen. Beginning with Friday’s 7 p.m. screening of “Psycho,” the Carolina Theatre in Durham kicks off two weeks of screenings with “An Alfred Hitchcock Retrospective,” featuring a curated assortment of his classic films on the big screen.

Of the 15 films being screened, 11 will be presented in the original 35-mm format, with the remaining four projected digitally in high definition. Carolina Theatre senior director Jim Carl, who curated the program, said several of the 35-mm prints in the retrospective are rare archival reels – some of them the sole remaining print of a particular film in the United States.

Tracking down the surviving prints can be an adventure in sleuthing. “There’s a supposition that there is this catalog where everything is listed alphabetically,” Carl said.

“Not so. It’s a very time-consuming, laborious process. It’s rarely cut and dried, and sometimes it’s a real maze.”

Carl began the process of chasing down the films about six months ago. He first had to determine who held the rights to each film, as deals and acquisitions over the years had scattered the rights among various distributors.

“And even if someone has the rights, they might not have a 35-mm print,” Carl said. “Then, even if they do have a print, it might not be available at the right time. We’re competing with other film programmers across the U.S. who might have their own Hitchcock series.”

Carl said he had initially planned the retrospective to be a one-week series focusing on lesser-known Hitchcock titles. But as the practical rights and availability issues played out, he decided to expand the series to two weeks and include some of Hitchcock’s more famous films.

“I’d spoken with other programmers around the U.S., and they had an interesting perspective I hadn’t thought of,” he said. “They said when they tried to put together a retrospective of unknown Hitchcock films, the audiences in the area complained – they wanted to see ‘Psycho’ and ‘Rear Window.’ ”

Carl decided to balance the series between Hitchccock’s popular films and some of his more obscure works. “Many of these films haven’t been screened in the Triangle for decades,” he said.

Carl also tried to track down classic episodes of the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” television series, but could not secure the rights to exhibit them theatrically. “I’m sure there are theaters out there who have done it, but if they have, they’ve done it illegally,” Carl said.

Some of the screenings may have brief introductions, Carl said, but he deliberately avoided adding additional events. “I’m a purist when it comes to film festivals,” he said. “I try to avoid convention settings with vendors or other events or sponsors. I want to focus on the films themselves.”

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The Carolina Theatre’s Hitchcock retrospective is a rare opportunity to see some of the director’s lesser-known films on the big screen. Some recommendations:

“The Paradine Case” (1947, 115 min, 35mm)
9:30 p.m. Friday
7:00 p.m. Monday

Starring Gregory Peck and Italian actress Alida Valli, this courtroom drama follows a British barrister who falls in love with his murder-suspect client. The film features familiar Hitchcockian themes – adultery, murder and the femme fatale – and the director’s first experiments with multiple camera techniques.

“The Trouble With Harry” (1955, 99 min, HD)
1 p.m. May 26
9:30 p.m. May 29

One of the director’s few comedies, “The Trouble With Harry” is nevertheless squarely in Hitchcock territory. Harry, you see, is dead – and the trouble concerns what to do with the corpse. The film also marks the director’s first collaboration with composer Bernard Herrmann.

“The 39 Steps” (1935, 86 min, 35mm)
3:00 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday
9:30 pm May 24

A huge hit in the U.K., “The 39 Steps” is an early example of the “MacGuffin” plot device, in which pursuit of a valuable but ambiguous object drives the story. Robert Donat stars as a tourist caught in a deadly game of European espionage, and the film is a marvel of watertight structure and plotting. The 35-mm print used in this screening is the only one in circulation in the U.S.

Based on a hugely popular 1987 Japanese novel, the quiet drama NORWEGIAN WOOD is a haunting coming-of-age story that explores love and loss against the backdrop of 1960s Tokyo.

As his fellow students protest and march—Tokyo had its ’60s radicals, too—brooding college student Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) falls into a romantic affair with the delicate, damaged Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi). The two come together in unspoken grief after the suicide of their mutual friend, Kizuki, who was also Naoko’s first love.

The young couple’s first sexual encounter leads to a emotional breakdown for Naoko, who retreats to a countryside sanitarium. Watanabe, meanwhile, executes a retreat of his own—into books and ideas and the new vistas of college life. He soon encounters the beautiful, free-spirited Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), whose sunniness seems a light at the end of his tunnel. Then things get complicated.

Norwegian Wood is a beautiful and melancholy film that moves to its own unhurried rhythms. Not much happens, but when it does, it’s tidal in force. Young love, the film suggests, is the same in any era or place—baffling, euphoric and occasionally scary as hell.

One fascinating aspect of the film’s love stories is that, for the central characters, the sex is anything but casual. The young adults in Norwegian Wood are suspended between Japanese cultural tradition and the glad tidings of the sexual revolution drifting in from the West. For them, sex is decidedly liberating—but also inseparable from honesty, responsibility and loyalty.

Director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) uses music to underline themes of past versus future; yesterday versus tomorrow. The traditional orchestral score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is punctuated by snippets from the Doors and the Beatles. Keep in mind this is 1960s Tokyo, back when Japanese hipsters shopped for American vinyl records, and not the other way around.

Norwegian Wood is one of those great little films you can usually find migrating to home video in any given week. The film had a limited release in a few North American cities earlier this year, but otherwise you’d need to have attended a festival in Toronto or Venice to catch this one.

The Extras: English subtitles, an hour-long making-of doc and a featurette on the film’s premiere at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Golden Lion award.

Formats: DVD and various digital platforms.

Also New This Week:

- Liam Neeson continues his oddly convincing makeover into hard-guy action hero with THE GREY (DVD/Blu-ray/digital) concerning planes crashes, wolves and Dermot Mulroney.

- The acclaimed indie doc WE WERE HERE (DVD/digital) documents the AIDS crisis in 1980s San Francisco through archival footage and eyewitness accounts.

- The sci-fi drama CHRONICLE (DVD/Blu-ray/digital) was a surprise critical and commercial success earlier this year, and suggests that the found-footage gimmick isn’t totally played out yet.

Plus: Glenn Close and Janet McTeer in their Oscar-nominated roles in the historical drama ALBERT NOBBS, Woody Harrelson in the cop drama RAMPART, Old Scratch in the exorcism thriller THE DEVIL INSIDE and the Criterion Collection’s reissue of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH on Blu-ray and DVD.

Is there a certain film that, if you come across it flipping channels randomly, you feel compelled to watch no matter what? Even though you’ve seen it roughly 34,000 times? Even if it’s just the last half hour of the movie? Even if it’s on the Spanish language station?

I have a theory about these films — I call them comfort movies. They’re familiar and soothing, and you can watch them again and again in the same way that you listen to old favorite records. For instance, anytime The Hunt for Red October is broadcast on basic cable (according to my rough calculations, about once every 9.4 hours), I must watch that movie. It might be a submarine movie thing, because the same happens with Crimson Tide and The Abyss.

Evidently, I find underwater drama soothing, for reasons I probably don’t want to know. I suppose I could pay a therapist $120/hour to find out, but I suspect no good news can possibly come of that.

Comfort movies and DVD

I review movies and DVDs for a living, so I have copies of all these films on a shelf somewhere. For me, they really are like old records, and knowing that I have a physical copy of them really is a comfort. Because I’ve learned the hard way: If you’re relying on digital download and on-demand services for your movies these days, you might literally not know what you’re missing.

As with music, movies are slowly but surely “going digital.” Increasingly viable digital distribution — via iTunes or Netflix or your local cable provider — prompts the question: Why even bother anymore with DVD, or its posh cousin the Blu-ray disc?

Well, I’ll tell you. I spend an alarming amount of time watching films and TV series collections on home video, and as such have given this matter an inordinate amount of thought. Here are some of the reasons to stick with DVD and Blu-ray in an increasingly downloadable world….

DVD Extras: Digital versions of movie titles never have the full suite of extras you get on the DVD or Blu-ray. In fact, many don’t have any extras at all. This is on purpose, of course — it’s one of ways Hollywood is trying to prop up DVD sales and rentals.

For those of us who value the behind-the-scenes details of a movie — the making-of docs, deleted scenes, alternate endings and gag reels — this is a dealbreaker on certain titles.

Some films, particularly historical epics or based-on-a-true-story movies, are genuinely enhanced by extras material which provide factual context in the form of documentaries or expert interviews. For instance, when director Robert Redford’s underrated 2010 historical drama The Conspirator came out on DVD, it included a full-length documentary on the Lincoln assassination. Watching them both together made for a fascinating home video double feature.

For blockbuster popcorn movies, particularly effects-heavy action pictures, the extras are sometimes even more interesting than the movie itself. Take Disney’s sci-fi reboot Tron: Legacy. Not a great film, but the DVD extras included some amazing behind-the-scenes material on the film’s gorgeous art design and terrific music (by legendary electronica duo Daft Punk).

Image and Sound Fidelity: For most movies available via download, particularly older titles, digital copy means a fairly radical dropoff in audio and video specs. The issue is further complicated depending on what device you’re transferring the movie to. Digital movies designed to be watched on a portable device necessarily have a smaller file size, which means lower-quality sound and image.

The good news here is that high-definition versions of new movies are becoming more common at the big online retailers like iTunes and Amazon, and many of the on-demand services for the living room TV have HD options now.

Closed Captioning: Due to certain technology issues with digital distribution, you can’t always get closed captioning on purchased or rented digital titles. And even when you can, they may not function across various devices. It’s a case-by-case situation, usually, and highly vexing if you’ve come to rely on closed captioning for whatever reason.

Subtitles can be hard to find with on-demand services, too — for instance, if you watch Netflix on your living room TV via a game console or set-top box. (Although thanks to some new initiatives by Netflix, that situation has been improving recently.)

Lending: This might seem obvious, but there’s one very simple thing you can do with a DVD or Blu-ray that is ridiculously complicated when dealing with digital media. You can grab that DVD off the shelf and lend it to a friend. I tend to be highly evangelical when it comes to movies I’m really into. I’ve probably circulated my DVD copy of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo to a dozen other parents at my kids’ school.

Thanks to the many technical and legal compilations of Digital Rights Management, or DRM, you just can’t do that with a digital copy of a movie — or a book or a record, for that matter. This is a ginormous Digital Age dilemma that is still sorting itself out, but meanwhile it means DVD has an advantage when it comes to one of pop culture’s most enduring pleasures — sharing movies with friends.

I imagine the day will come when we will all have instant access to high-quality digital movies, with all the extras attached and all the viewing rights included. But that day isn’t here yet. When I crave one of my favorite comfort movies, I’m glad I still have my old-fashioned DVD library.

DVD Case Study: Hugo

The utterly enchanting Hugo, director Martin Scorcese’s love letter to cinema and childhood, makes a strong case for DVD/Blu-ray over digital. I like this movie a lot, but my kids absolutely love it, which means it’s been in heavy living room rotation for weeks now.

Had we opted for a digital rental of Hugo — via iTunes, say — we would have been able to watch it exactly once, within 30 days of purchase, and would be required to finish the film within 24 hours of pressing play. As parents know, kids just don’t tend to operate within such schedules.

The DVD/Blu-ray combo pack also includes five excellent featurettes that explore details of the film’s production and elements of cinematic history. For the grown-ups, this stuff is gold, and you can’t get the full extras package in any downloadable bundle.

Finally, Hugo is a lush film, both visually and aurally, and with Blu-ray you get maximum home video specs with 1080p high-definition and 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio. Hugo is also one of the very few films to make truly artful use of 3D technology, and the retail package includes a Blu-ray 3D disc for those with the proper home theater setup.

Raleigh News & Observer

There’s a moment toward the middle of “Wicked,” the popular musical playing at DPAC tonight through May 27, when it all comes together.

As the music swells, Elphaba the Wicked Witch (Christine Dwyer) appears to levitate to the top of the proscenium via concealed wires and clever stagecraft. Below, the ensemble dancers swirl, and the musicians pull out all the stops. Above, a giant clockwork dragon roars and the strobed spotlights kick into overdrive.

Holding aloft her magic broom, Dwyer finishes the show’s signature song, “Defying Gravity,” with a powerhouse final note as the lights cut out. After an instant of stunned silence, the DPAC cheers come in waves.

These are the moments you’re paying for with a show like “Wicked,” returning to Durham for a encore run after a series of sold-out shows in 2010. And with ticket prices running up to $170, these moments need to deliver. For the most part, they do. “Wicked” is top-shelf theatrical entertainment almost by definition. A touring show of this magnitude draws the industry’s best performers and designers, and the story and songs proved their staying power long ago.

For the uninitiated, “Wicked” is a prequel of sorts to the “Wizard of Oz.” Based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, it’s a creative and quasi-feminist re-imagining in which the Wicked Witch is the heroine, the Good Witch is a pawn, the Wizard is a crook and Dorothy is an afterthought.

Story-wise, the musical departs significantly from the book’s postmodern fantasy ambitions. But the basics remain, shuffled to satisfy the requirement of this particular style of musical theater: broad themes, dramatic conflicts and catchy songs with intricate, in-rhyming lyrics.

In the lead, Dwyer delivers the goods with great comic instincts and that piledriver voice. (Dwyer understudied the role in the 2010 run.) She also successfully sells the character’s transformation from geeky green student to imperious flying witch. Character motivations in “Wicked” can be a bit complex – “baffling” is the less charitable term – but Dwyer does what she can to provide a clear throughline.

As the goody-goody Glinda, Tiffany Haas holds her own and provides the proper counterpoint notes. The show depends heavily on the energy between the two leads, and Dwyer and Haas navigate the big duets and story moments with a practiced ease.

With one conspicuous exception. “Popular,” another of the musical’s showcase numbers, is a pivotal scene that features a song with a totally killer hook. (Kanye West even managed to turn a sample from the song into a hip-hop sensation). This scene is meant to crackle and pop, but – in the Thursday night performance at least – it fizzled and flopped.

The show has maybe two or three similarly underwhelming moments, but overall there’s really nothing to complain about. The stage design and especially the costuming are artful and more than a little weird. The ensemble Ozlanders dress in a mad riot of outfits that suggest a collision of Victorian finery and disco Zoot suits.

In any case, Thursday night’s DPAC crowd seemed well-satisfied indeed, including the many younger attendees. Outside the lobby, one cluster of tween girls took turns imitating Glinda’s patented hair-tossing move and raving about their night out together at the theater. Nothing wrong with that.